


Wayward Son

by Blaumeise



Series: Foxhill [2]
Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, Magic, Tags May Change, Urban Fantasy, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28148271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blaumeise/pseuds/Blaumeise
Summary: A timestamp for the Foxhill series. Or maybe a prequel. Or a little bit of both. I'll add chapters now and then about all those events before Duff showed up.
Series: Foxhill [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980472
Comments: 51
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

When old Mr Stradlin was laid to rest, everybody who lived in Foxhill was there to pay their respect. Everybody except Izzy. 

It was early April, warm for the season, and I was sweating in my thick, black wool dress, the only garment Miss Agatha had deemed appropriate for the occasion. I had given her a piece of my own mind, that Mr Stradlin wouldn’t have loved me any less if I had appeared in pink muslin to sing a bacchanalian song on his grave, but she had given me a long-suffering look through her lunettes, and with a sigh, I had put on the dress. 

The funeral was a communal affair. There hadn’t been enough money left to pay the undertaker, and everybody had given what little they could spare, even if it was only half a penny. And now everybody had come to get their tiny slice of Mr Stradlin’s last journey. 

I would have attended anyway, not only because of Izzy. I had liked the old scammer. Mr Stradlin had never expected me to behave like a girl or, worse, a lady. He had called me ‘my boy’ at first and ‘young man’ later, and had looked kindly on my friendship with his delinquent foster son. And if I had appeared in a pink dress and sung drinking songs at his funeral, he would have raised his glass in appreciation from the other side. 

Now I stood by his grave, my red hair an indecent splash of colour in the sea of black, and watched the coffin being lowered to its final resting place. Miss Agatha dapped a handkerchief at her eyes. She had been one of the bigger donors, just as she was one of the pillars of our community. This winter had hit her with a shovel over the chignon, but she still considered it her duty to make an appearance. And to ask Izzy to come for lunch and offer him the bed in the attic. 

Mr Stradlin had shown first signs of sickness in January, but everybody had been sick that year and so it had gone unnoticed how hard they were struggling. I should have gotten suspicious when Izzy’s clothes seemed to grow on him, but boys our age often were a bit lanky. With Miss Agatha bedridden and the household and business solely on my delicate shoulders, I had spent most of my time behind the counter of _A. Rose’s Herbs and Spices_. I had worried more about balancing books and not accidentally turning people into frogs by botching up recipes, than about my friend’s growing state of neglect. 

Sometimes I wondered if it was the reason why he had left me. 

Izzy wasn’t one to ask for help and every year, come spring, they had been spread a little thinner than was healthy. Is that an excuse? No. I should have noticed that this year it hadn’t been enough to ask him to stay for dinner and send him home with a few leftovers. 

Doctors were expensive and medicine was, too, and sustaining a growing opium habit hadn’t made things easier for him. Izzy was an excellent swimmer in tricky waters, but after a couple of months, he was drowning in debts and arrears. His powers, rare in one of our kind, were about as precious and beautiful as a beam of sunrise over the misty ocean. And about as valuable in a monetary sense. 

Foxhill was a community and nobody had threatened an old, sick man with eviction, but now, after his death, Izzy would lose his home. 

I had never asked Miss Agatha whether he could move in with us. I had treated it as a given. She called him a rascal and a tramp and a bad influence in general, but she had a heart for those or she wouldn’t have picked me off the streets all those years back. 

Izzy’s soul, when one bothered to dig long enough through the heaps of shit life had piled up on top of it to find it, was a bright one, shining with wit and spirit and curiosity. And like a bored little boy who had been left alone with a box of matches and a stack of old newspapers, he had charred and burned its edges until even I could see the tarnished hue to his aura.

When the funeral was over, I returned Miss Agatha to Stakesby Road. I barely took the time to get rid of the black dress and put on something less suffocating before I was back on the street and ran through the labyrinth of alleys that made up Foxhill. I stopped in front of the crumbling house at the end of Pickerton Close in which Mr Stradlin and Izzy had accumulated back rent for two rooms. 

I knocked and listened, but when nobody answered, I turned the handle. The door was locked and I rolled my eyes. Leave it to Izzy to be this childish on such a day. Defusing each other’s locking spells was an ongoing competition between us, one we had started only a few weeks after he had found the gall to ask me to go out with him, and had kept up ever since. 

I was better at this game, not only because my powers were more practical than his, but also because Miss Agatha had been meticulous when it came to my magical education. This time, however, he had taken a lot of effort to make it difficult for me. It took me almost ten minutes to come up with the solution, but then the lock turned. 

“Take that!” I said and opened the door. 

The first room was empty, not only in the sense of devoid of Izzy but devoid of anything of value. Even the furniture was gone. I stepped into the second one, which had been their bedroom, and found the same. 

I should have expected it. 

Izzy had always been a restless spirit, but this winter, he had abstained from his usual forays into freedom. Instead of vanishing for days as had been his habit for as long as I had known him, he had stayed home and taken care of his foster father. 

Another indication that should have tipped me off regarding the direness of their situation but I had just been happy to have him around and available. 

I had known that as soon as Mr Stradlin had passed on, Izzy would feel the urge to disappear for a week, maybe even two, and had been resolved to be supportive instead of feeling slighted, as I usually would. But deep inside I had been sure that Izzy would return to me. So sure, that I had cleaned the attic the day before the funeral, had put sheets on the bed and an oil lamp on the little table. Maybe he wouldn’t need it today, but he would need it soon. 

I had been such a fool. 

There wasn’t a single chair left and so I sat down on the floor and pressed the fists into my eyes to keep myself from crying. I told myself that he might just as well be on one of his regular vagrancies, back tomorrow or in a week, a month, but in my heart, I knew that he wouldn’t return. The lock told me all I needed to know. It was just like Izzy to say goodbye with some stupid spell puzzle, instead of having the decency to write a heartfelt letter I could shed my tears over. 

No, I wouldn’t cry, and I didn’t. I rolled up on the dirty floor, where I choked on my grief, drowned in my pain, and suffocated on my despair. 

I was nineteen years old, and Izzy Stradlin had been my only friend.


	2. Chapter 2

At twenty-one years old, I had made quite a name for myself. 

My abilities had grown in nicely, and by a stroke of luck – that fickle bitch had decided to favour me for a change – my strengths ran parallel to what sold well in a magical community. 

Miss Agatha died sudden and peaceful, and except for yours truly, nobody was surprised that she had left the house and the shop to me. So what, if I had been running the business for three years now? I knew from experience that getting complacent was the best way to have fate grab me by the balls and cut them off. Literally. 

But neither distant relatives nor estranged children showed up with grabby hands, and overnight I became the owner of _A. Rose’s Herbs and Spices_. Together with her house and her shop, Miss Agatha had left another legacy to me. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just ‘Axl’ anymore. 

I opened the shop the morning after the funeral. Miss Agatha had never endorsed my tendency to hole up in my room and wallow in self-pity, and while I was determined to indulge all of my vices tomorrow, today I wanted to do her proud. She had liked to call me a thorn in her flesh, but during the last years, it had sounded more and more often like ‘comfort of her old age’. 

At least I liked to pretend it had. Maybe I was wrong. According to Izzy, I wouldn’t notice ambivalence if it ran me down with a carriage and four, turned around and trampled me into the ground while I was still busy collecting my broken bones. 

My first client that day, a woman from outside our community, came in and asked for the witch of Foxhill. Miss Agatha’s interment had been one step down from a state funeral, and so my first reaction had been to ask her if the stupidity was hereditary or whether she had just forgotten to brush off her brain during her morning toilet. 

Instead, I stood up a little straighter, looked her in the eye, and said with so much dignity, Izzy would have suffered a hernia from laughter: 

“That’s me. How can I help you Ma’am?” 

_A. Rose’s Herbs and Spices_ became my life. I got up in the morning, had breakfast and opened the shop. I ate lunch, I ate dinner, and in the evening, I prepared ready-to-use potions and amulets for all kinds of requirements. It structured my days, provided my livelihood and kept me from jumping off some random cliff. As Whittlingsfield was full of cliffs, the possibility was not to be underestimated. 

My customers were happy with my services, if not with my attitude. 

Before Miss Agatha had left us, I had made an effort to be agreeable, not because I had considered it necessary, but because she always had threatened to whack my backside with a wooden spoon if I didn’t. Would she have done it? How should I know? The integrity of my ass was sacred to me, and I had never challenged her to put her money where her mouth was. There were risks one did not take with Miss Agatha. 

Izzy had once said, amiability came as natural to me as grace to a hippopotamus, but as Izzy had never seen a hippopotamus in all of his life, what did he know about their grace? Maybe it was a compliment and neither of us was aware of it. 

Izzy. 

I was twenty-two, Izzy had been gone for three years, and yet that cocklebur of a wizard was still entangled in my hair. Memories of his dreamy eyes, his lopsided smirk, and caustic remarks, created phantom pains where he had amputated himself out of my life. 

_The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed._

Yes, I know the Bible. Sue me. I grew up on it and now and then I regurgitate quotes like I puked up moonshine during my last midsummer night with Izzy: foul, vile and reflexive.

I was never sure whether Izzy was the emerods or the scab. He was annoying enough to be both, and I definitely wouldn’t be healed thereof. Not in my lifetime. 

Whenever his stupid face popped up in my mind, while I was sorting mandrakes, for example, or scraping chicken shit out of the coop, I wondered if this was his way of contacting me. I wouldn’t put it past him. Izzy had always fabulated about how one day he would walk the astral planes. 

“Sure,” I had said. “And your farts will smell like lilies of the valley.” 

One of the reasons for Mr Stradlin’s move to Foxhill had been to find a tutor for his extraordinarily gifted foster son. An expectation surpassed in its naivety only by his hopes that Izzy might grow up to one day be a happy, and well-adjusted young man. 

To cut things short: neither had happened. Izzy had tutored himself and his level of adjustment was something better not talked about in polite society.

But what, I wondered when he walked through my daydreams like a faun through the woods, what if he had indeed reached the astral plane? Or some other poxy higher sphere I was forever excluded from? It would be just like Izzy to descend to us mere mortals, and rub it in how much further he had advanced than me. 

Sometimes, when the loneliness drilled holes into my stomach and tempted me to numb it by applying a few of my not so savoury abilities, I thought about getting a cat. A black one. It might sit on the counter, glare at customers, and at night, it would be warm and cuddly in my bed. Pathetic, I know. Being a redheaded witch was enough of a cliché. If I added a cat to the mix, I might just as well don a pointy hat, a star-spangled cape, and grow warts on my nose. 

I was too pretty for warts I decided, and said good-bye to the hypothetical cat. And anyway, I had Lucy. 

Lucy was an imp. Every morning around eight, she would come over to cook and clean. As every imp, she was frightfully shy. Whenever I entered a room, she fled to another one. All I ever saw of her were the stools and ladders she needed to reach anything that was higher up than my hip. On payday, I had to place the coins on a plate together with a sugar lump, and deposit it on the bottom step of the staircase. 

Half of the time, I stumbled over the dish on my way down from the laboratory, kicked it through the corridor, and crunched the sugar lump under my heels. 

Whenever that happened, my plans to get a cat solidified, warts be damned. 

One morning in January I woke up early and noticed, that nature had graced us with snow. I wrapped myself in one of Miss Agatha’s morning gowns, pulled my nightcap almost down to my nose, and grumblingly ploughed my way to the outhouse. Back home and on my way to my warm, comfortable bed, the shop bell rang. 

Some clients were unbelievable. They had gotten it into their squishy little brains that just because I ran a shop it was my sacred duty to supply them day and night with whatever they had forgotten to stock up on in their short-sightedness. 

My first impulse was to ignore it, but just on the odd possibility that somebody had braved the weather due to a true emergency, I headed for the front door. I made out a dark figure through the window, tall and wrapped up in enough wool to make half a dozen sheep happy. How far had this imbecile travelled to pay me a visit at 6 AM? 

“What?” I snapped when I ripped the door open. 

It was always good to make your displeasure known at once, lest people get the impression that it was all right to show up with ludicrous requests in the middle of the night. 

The imbecile pushed a broad brimmed hat back, then peeled off a scarf to reveal soft eyes in a gaunt, pale face. 

“Hi, Axl,” Izzy said. 

I slammed the door shut, pushed my back against it, and closed my eyes. When I was confident that my heart would not spontaneously burst out of my chest, I took a deep breath and turned around. 

Izzy was gone. 

For a moment I was sure that it had been just another spontaneous invasion into the sanctity of my mind, this time intent on driving me insane and have me delivered to an asylum. To be sure that he was truly a figment of my imagination, I opened the door and peered outside. He was already fifty yards down the street, a blotch of soot in a whirlwind of snowflakes. 

“You made me wait for three years, you goddamned pillock!” I yelled after him. “And you can’t even give me ten seconds to realign my seven chakras? Come back here this instant, or I swear, I’ll make a clothesline out of your intestines and bury your carcass under a heap of chicken shit!”

Izzy stopped. He turned around and came back to me, slowly, as if he didn’t have a single care in the world. 

“Name them,” he said, when he stood in front of me. 

I couldn’t. Of course not, I had never listened when he had wafted on about this quixotic stuff. Izzy was the one who lived in higher spheres, I enchanted amulets and concocted magical potions. You didn’t need a single chakra for that, leave alone seven. 

“Come in,” I said and stepped to the side. “I don’t want to shovel snow out of the shop.


	3. Chapter 3

Izzy trampled back into my life in the same way he had excused himself from it: without an explanation. 

I ushered him into the direction of the kitchen, ignoring the trail of snow and wool he left in his wake. The hat was dropped onto the counter, the coat on the table by the door, and the scarf got caught in the arms of a chandelier. I thanked the gods when despite looking wet to the skin, he made no moves to undress himself any further. I was not prepared to see him in his unmentionables. 

“Boots off!” I snapped and he shed them, too, abandoning them toppled over in the corridor for the next person to stumble and break their neck. Izzy had always been a slob, but this time I wondered if he was too exhausted to care. 

The kitchen was frigid. The night before, I had banked the fire and now I added kindling to the still glowing coals. They gleamed softly and then, with a loud pop, the first flame shot up. 

Izzy stood in the middle of the room as if I had led him somewhere completely unfamiliar. What had he expected, that I would offer him the chicken coop? I pointed to the bench next to the table, the exact same place where had always been sitting whenever he had stayed over for lunch or dinner or some other intermediate meal Miss Agatha had dished out because Izzy had looked as if he hadn’t yet eaten that day. 

“Tea?” I asked. 

“Sorry for waking you.” His teeth shattered through his words. 

“You didn’t,” I replied. “I was getting ready for an early breakfast with the Queen.”

His lips twitched a little. They were flaky from the frost and still slightly blue. The snow had melted from his hair and it hung around his face like seaweed, looking darker than it was. Izzy had never been good at taking care of himself, but the state he was in now left me angry. 

“Miss Agatha still asleep?” 

“Miss Agatha is dead.”

He nodded as if he had suspected it. 

“The shop feels different,” he confirmed my suspicion. “I’m really sorry, Axl.”

I was, too, but I doubted he had returned to deliver his condolences. I desperately wanted to delude myself, but what was the point? Izzy’s return hadn’t been fuelled by a burning desire to see me, but because he had nowhere left to go. 

Which events had brought him down to this state of despair was another question, one I could have asked, of course. But asking Izzy about his whereabouts had always been as rewarding as digging for gold in a heap of waste. I doubted much had changed. Nevertheless, I decided to try my luck. 

“How were the astral planes?”

“Cold,” he said. 

He was shaking worse than on that fateful day when he had for the first time tried to say good-bye to opium. How long had he been outside? I wanted to wrap a blanket around him, swaddle him like a baby, and at the same time slap him with Miss Agatha’s wooden spoon for his stupidity. I watched my motherly instincts battle with the less charitable ones, curious which of the two would win. 

In the end, I put on water and prepared the teapot. So much for priding myself on not giving in to my female side. Izzy had always made me melt like cheese in the sun, reducing me to a soft, smelly blob. It’s the reason why everybody had always assumed that I was sweet on him. 

“You look as if you have been walking all night.”

“Didn’t seem a good idea to lie down for a nap in this weather.”

Jesus. I fetched a few eggs and pulled the pan out, torn between putting it on the stove and smashing it over his head. 

I knew the feeling and I knew that Izzy knew it, too. There is killing oneself and then there is killing oneself, and the second version is hardly less effective than the first one. If you jump off a cliff or put a bullet through your brain, it’s quick and fast and over. Going down the second road will drag on like syphilis. You will cut yourself apart, one limb at a time, not on purpose, but because you stopped caring about what is happening to you. The end is the same, just a little later and with a shitload more pain and misery.

The water boiled and I made enough tea for both of us. 

“So, this all yours now?”

He made an all-encompassing gesture, as if he didn’t only mean the house and the shop, but added all of Foxhill and even Whittlingsfield to the equation. He was not wrong, I realized. Every magical community needed a witch or a wizard and I was the pitiful excuse Foxhill had to offer. Izzy could have taken that position just as well, but, skittish as a foal who saw the bridle for the first time, he had shied away from the responsibility. Nobody reined in Izzy and whoever tried was up for a kick in the balls. 

“Yes.” 

We drank in silence. Izzy wrapped his hands around the mug as if he tried to soak the warmth right out of it. I noticed frostnip at two of his fingertips. It didn’t look too bad and I decided to ignore it.

When the eggs were done, I served them with bread. I wasn’t hungry. 

Izzy wolved down his meal as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He barely swallowed, used the bread to wipe the last bit of yolk off his plate, then licked his fingers clean. I pushed my own half-finished breakfast over to him, and after a second of hesitation and another one of shame, he repeated the process. 

“Need more?” I asked. 

I saw the reluctance on his face, but then he shook his head. 

“How long did it take you?” he asked. "The lock?" 

It took me a moment to follow the sudden turn in his convoluted thought process. Then I snorted. I pictured him over the last three years, a lonely figure in black wool, wandering snow-covered mountains and mumbling to himself ‘how long did it take Axl to crack the lock?’

“That what brought you back?”

“Among other things.”

“Two minutes,” I lied. 

“No!”

“Yes! You’re not as good as you think you are.”

For a moment, the old Izzy was back, tickled by every challenge, always ready to come up with the next round of mischief. 

“I’m better,” he answered. His voice was softer than the snowflakes outside. He meant it. “I did walk the astral planes.”

There was no boast in his voice. No surprise either. Yes, the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening. Spring followed winter and autumn took the place of summer. And Izzy had walked the astral planes. 

I believed him. 

“Out with it,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Can I stay for a day?” he asked. “Maybe two? I promise I’ll be out of your hair after that.”

He needed sleep, that much was obvious. Food, rest, maybe a place to hide. 

“Somebody after you?” 

He shook his head. I watched for a moment, looking for signs that he was lying. Izzy wasn’t the most honest person I knew. Scratch that, whenever it suited him Izzy was a goddamn liar, and it suited him most of the time. His lies were rarely blatant. He preferred to twist the facts, omitted pieces of information, or presented them in a light that fit his intentions. The truth was a pebble tossed into a silent pond, the rings in the water whatever Izzy decided to make out of it. 

I nodded. 

“Do you need something against the cravings?”

Another shake of the head. 

“You sure?”

“I stopped ages ago.”

“Good to know. Because if I find you drugged in my house, I’ll kick your sorry ass out on the street, no matter the weather.”

He nodded, evading my eyes, and again I wondered if he was lying. 

“I understand.” 

That should have made me happy, but it didn’t. I wanted him to talk back to me, tell me it wasn’t my business, that he was a big boy and could take care of himself, and what was it to me anyway? I wanted my old Izzy, wilful, destructive, sure of himself. Not this meek little lamb, waiting to be shown its place in the stable. 

And speaking of that. I had to find a bed for him. Space was not a problem. The house was no mansion, but it was big enough to host a half-frozen wizard on top of me. Skinny as he was, I could have stored Izzy in the coal box and still found space for kindling and old newspaper. 

The sensible thing, after Miss Agatha’s death, would have been to move into her room. It was bigger, the bed was better, and it was the place where the master of the house was supposed to rest his head on downy pillows at night. 

I hadn’t been able to. 

My clothes hung in Miss Agatha’s wardrobe, and my personal belongings were stored in her dresser. I had even tried to sleep there once, only to return to my own bed in the middle of the night. 

Having Izzy sleep in her bed was unimaginable. A sacrilege. In his pitiful condition he was no match for Miss Agatha’s bed. It would swallow him whole. That left the attic, but as soon as I thought about the bed in the attic, I also remembered the day he had left me. How I had returned after not crying on his dirty floor, had removed the sheets and stuffed them back into the linen closet. 

“Give me a few minutes,” I said. 

Time to grow up. I went into my room and gathered whatever I hadn’t moved out yet. I tossed another set of blanket, pillow and sheets on a chair, but if he wanted to sleep, he would have to make his own bed this time. Never again would I do it for him. 

I returned to the kitchen. 

“My old room,” I said. 

Izzy stood up. 

“Thank you, Axl,” he said and then, gathering all his social abilities in one swoop. “I know, I …”

“Shut up, Izzy.” 

I didn’t want to hear it. For three years I had thought I wanted to see him like this, humble, humiliated, begging for my help. And explaining what the hell he had been thinking when he ran off like that. Now I had him exactly there and realized, it was farther away from my needs than Australia from Piccadilly Circus. 

“I have to open the shop,” I said. “Go to sleep.”


	4. Chapter 4

Magic comes at a cost. Always. 

It was the first lesson Miss Agatha ever taught me and none of the countless lessons that followed left as much of an impression. One might think I had gotten that little piece of wisdom the morning I woke up in a body that wasn’t mine, but looking back, she is the one I have to credit for it. 

Actually, it was the price for the second lesson that hammered home the first one, and it came in the form of a dress. A simple, dark blue one, nothing frilly, nothing girly, but still: a dress. 

“I’m a man!” I said, and stomped my foot. 

“A boy,” Miss Agatha corrected me. “One I would love to see grow into a man one day. Not that I’m holding my breath.”

“Boys don’t wear dresses either!” 

“This one will,” she replied. “At least if he wants me to teach him magic.”

I resisted heroically for two days full of longing and yearning and agony, but the indignity of wearing a dress was about as effective in keeping me away from my nature as my stepfather’s belt had been. For the first time in my life, I was not punished for this raging fire that burned inside my mind, no, I was offered a handle on it. A way to kindle, control, exploit it instead of the other way round. How could I resist?

On the third day, I came down for breakfast wearing blue. 

“Fine,” was Miss Agatha’s only comment on my humiliation. “Let’s get started.”

Pride, I had learned, is a bad advisor for a wizard. Humility is a better one. I don’t know when or how Izzy learned this lesson, but somehow, somewhere, he did. 

I took to magic like a duck to water but Izzy took to it like a swallow to the sky.

His was so different from mine. He lacked my power, I lacked his delicacy. Where I scratched, he tickled, where I demanded, he pried. I came down in thunder and lightning. Izzy was a gentle summer rain, soaking rather than deluging. 

My magic demanded something firm to hold on to, a tangible object I could enchant, bewitch, send my energy to. Izzy wove spiderwebs into the morning fog, frail and wispy, and so, so beautiful. I was sure he laced them with tiny pieces from his soul.

“When will that boy get his heads out of the clouds?” Miss Agatha used to say. 

I could have told her that not only Izzy’s head was up in the clouds, his magic was, too. It was as impossible for him to let go of his auras and spheres and dimension as it was for me to say good bye to potions and crystals and amulets. 

The day of his return, I processed the inane requests of my customers with even less patience than I usually mustered. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Mr Grant that his wife’s lacking enthusiasm regarding her marital duties was unlikely to stem from his too short penis, but rather from having gifted him with five lovely children over the course of the last six years. Adding that a) granting that poor woman a break and b) looking for an additional source of income to keep his brood in food and clothes would do better in getting her back into the mood than wasting their meagre funds on turning his unsatisfactory tool into that of a donkey, didn’t endear me to him either. 

I did, however, make a note to have a private little talk with Mrs Grant, and recommend one of my more popular potions to her, either the one that kept her from conceiving with the regularity of a broodmare, or the other one that would significantly dampen her clod of a husband’s need to force his attentions on her. I would challenge Izzy on a bet about which one she would go for. 

And there we were again. Izzy. What was I about to do? Did I want him back? He was like the voices in Mrs Buell’s head and which she feared were sent to her by the devil, but missed terribly whenever they took a break of a few days. 

What had I told Mrs Buell? Oh yes. To hell what people thought about them, if the voices were entertaining than she had every right to gossip about her neighbours with them. 

Things would be so much easier if Izzy was still the bodyless voice in my head, he had been for the last three years instead of the very corporeal brain tumour he had grown into over the course of one single morning. Was he even Izzy? My Izzy? He was different, but so was I. But where I prided myself on a certain growth from an insecure little boy into a … not quite as insecure man, something about this new Izzy felt plain wrong. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. 

I wondered what he was doing. Would he be asleep? Lie awake and stare at the ceiling? Plan his escape? Wallow in self-pity?

No, the latter was my specialty, not Izzy’s. 

He didn’t leave the comfort of my very nice bed to come down for lunch and, sure that sleep was the best at the moment, I left him to drool onto my pillows. For dinner he decided to crawl out from under my second best feather-bed, sleepy and unsteady, like a dormouse coming out of hibernation. His eyes were just as big, too. I wanted to close my hands around him and feel him move between them. 

Three years gone, a handful of hours back, and I was falling under his spell. 

“What are you plans?” I asked, to shift my attention from my failures to his. 

Lucy had already set the table, two plates, observant little imp that she was, and all that was left for me was to put the soup in the middle. 

“Plans?”

Izzy was unable to take his eyes off the pot, not like a dog following its food dish, but like a man sinking into quicksand, and not daring to struggle and reach for the lifeline that was the tiniest bit out of reach. 

“Plans. Help yourself. I’m not your footman.”

He did his best to restrain himself, but it would be a few days before he got used to regular eating. 

“Plans, Izzy,” I repeated when the last pieces of soaked bread were gone from his plate. “Do you have any?”

“I …,” 

His thoughts raced. It was obvious from the way his eyes darted nervously from left to right. He tried to come up with a reply that would satisfy me, but we had been apart for so long that he wasn’t sure what type of answer I expected. I watched and waited and watched, and then I realized what had bugged me all the time: His aura had changed. 

I don’t know much about auras. I know that I draw energy from it to do my magic, but that has never been a conscious process and took me one hell of a time to regulate. I’m about as well-tempered as a bottle of nitroglycerin and my go-to method for a not working spell used to be: more power. There was a time when Miss Agatha banned me to the wood shed for my experiments because she feared for the integrity of the building structure. 

And there was the day when Mr Harris came over to help me build a new woodshed. But I digress. 

Like most magical beings, I can see an aura if I concentrate, but as they never made much sense to me, I tend not to bother. 

Auras consist of light. They can be bright, dim, clear, dense, misty, or smoky. They can gleam and glint and flare and flicker, and if there is no rule about what they are supposed to do, how am I supposed to read them? 

Does it matter if there are dark blotches in the corner? What if smoke wafts through them as if damp wood was burning in a badly maintained fireplace? Or if they are full of speckles, like a galloping horse had kicked mud at an unsuspecting passerby? 

I had asked Izzy about it and his answer had astounded me in its clarity: “Depends.”

He had driven me crazy with that shit. He would say things like “If the moon is one third full, and we’re close to the summer solstice, but not fully there yet and … listen, Axl, this is important… it hasn’t rained for three days in a row, but you can expect a thunderstorm before midnight, then that little dim spot there means that the woman is pregnant with a girl.”

Until today I have no idea if he was pulling my leg or not, but one thing I did know: at sixteen years old, Izzy Stradlin read an aura like nobody else. It was the one capacity that earned him some money, and not only because people wanted to know if there was a girl or a boy on the way. His assessments were down to the point, detailed to a fault, and always correct. 

“What happened to you?” I blurted out before he had a chance to fake an answer that might satisfy me. “To your aura?”

“What’s up with my aura?”

He attempted to give me an innocent look, but they had never worked for him. I’ve seen potatoes with more theatrical talents than Izzy. 

“It’s clean.” 

He bit his lip, and as the frost had bitten before him, it started to bleed. His tongue flicked out and caught the droplet of blood. 

“I can’t see my own aura,” he said. “What do you mean, it’s clean?”

“Stop giving me this bullshit.”

Yes, this was my old Izzy, ready to engage in the familiar dance. I prodded for information while he turned the table on me. This time I wasn’t having any of it. This was my house he had sought out for shelter, my food he was eating, my … goddammit, I sounded like my stepfather. 

Why is it that we keep repeating the mistakes our parents made? Had I looked the way Izzy now looked at me? Wide eyed? Worried I might kick him out? Trying to appease me when he had no idea what would set me off? 

“I may be useless at this, but your aura has never been clear. It was smoky and nebulated and full of wisps and tendrils.” And I knew size, position and direction of every single one of them. 

He bit his lip again and I wanted to tell him to stop it before he made himself bleed again. 

“You mean like this?” 

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, heavy, as what he was doing aroused him in some way. And then I saw the first cirrus form, dark swirls, the misty patches I knew too well, even the scorched edges, the damage he had inflicted over the years. He opened his eyes again and everything vanished, leaving no traces on a the clear, clean, boring surface. 

“How do you do that?” I asked, still not believing what I was seeing. 

“I learned to control it,” he said. 

“You control your aura?”

It was impossible. Nobody was able to control their aura, just like nobody controlled the tide or winds or the goddamned course of the seasons. That thing controlled you!

He nodded. 

“What the hell for?”

For a moment we just stared at each other. Then Izzy’s bleeding lips pulled backwards and he started to laugh. It was a snicker, at first, barely audible, but quickly in grew into a full roar of laughter. It sounded a little hickuppy, as if he hadn’t laughed in a long time and needed to get the hang of it. 

I watched him full of indignation, but then, as always, I couldn’t help it. Izzy’s laughter was as contagious as the clap and I joined until we were both out of breath. 

“Really, Axl,” he said, snorting between words. “Here I just demonstrated my best trick and all you can think of is, what for?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “It must have taken an incredible amount of effort to achieve that and I have no idea why you would even try?”

He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “I have no idea,” he said, as if I had asked him why his eyes were brown or his smile so damn irresistible. “I wanted to know if I can!”

It’s always been like that. I may seem to be the erratic one, but there is always a goal behind my actions. Sure, often enough it is a rather petty goal or one that only makes sense in my sometimes not fully rational brain, but a goal nevertheless.

Izzy has always been driven by a different force, the one to test boundaries. If you want to hurt Izzy, cause him true, physical agony, then restrict his freedom, limit his movements, narrow his scope of action. He will bite off his own foot to escape the trap. 

Tell him he can’t control his aura? Be sure to watch because he’s going to show you that, yes, he can. 

“Look,” I said. 

I was setting myself up for more heartache and I knew it. I had had all day to think about it. Fact was, I was lonely. The alternative would be to get a cat. Every evening I heard old Mrs Sands yell “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty” through Foxhill and every night I wondered if she was calling for the mangy tabby cat or her daughter Katherine who had died from consumption two years ago. I didn't want to end like her.

Once upon a time, when I was young and stupid and male, I was dreaming the dream everybody dreams at some point: find a nice girl, get married, start a family. Then I turned myself into the nice – or not so nice – girl and the plan got pearshaped. It left me with the alternative option to find a nice young man, but that plan had another set of holes: I may be on my way right into spinsterhood, but like Miss Agatha, I was going to be an independent, property owning spinster. The moment I signed my name on a marriage contract, all that would be over. My house, my shop, my life, my body, would no longer be mine. I would rather burn myself on the stake than allow that to happen. 

I could get a cat or I could keep Izzy. Both were similar. You never knew where the bloody beast was, whether he would come home or had moved on, and every few weeks there would be a new nick in his ear. 

“We both know you won’t be gone in two days.”

I expected instant protest, but Izzy remained silent, hoping I would offer what he was too proud to ask for.

“Stop chewing your lip!” I snapped. “If I see you lick anymore blood, I’ll start to suspect you got turned into a goddamned vampire.”

“Sorry.” He folded his hands in front of him. 

“Two rules,” I said and his eyes narrowed. “No opium. No matter the form. And if you leave, and I don’t mean your little trips God knows where, I mean if you set off to not come back – you tell me.”

“That,” Izzy said and the wrinkles on his forehead smoothed out, “is reasonable.”


	5. Chapter 5

Nobody had ever cared about Maisie Milligan. 

Sixth child of eleven, fifth girl in a row, her nose too big, her hair not as bright blue as her sisters’, Maisie had been told what every plain girl is told: if she was kind and helpful, meek of spirit and a good housewife, then sooner or later a nice boy would notice her inner values. 

I don’t know if things ever happen that way, but I have my doubts. I was neither kind nor helpful, my housewifely skills were non-existent and when it came to being meek of spirit … let’s better not go there. 

My values were definitely not of the inner variety, yet keeping nice and not so nice boys at a distance was a hassle. I did so with the help of a sharp tongue, threats of witchery and, if all that failed, the use of a pitchfork. 

All right, the last had happened only once. Izzy had stood by and watched and applauded, and afterwards he had bought me a drink in celebration. 

When I was a newly made fifteen-year-old girl I had no idea what trials and horrors lay ahead of me. The female body is a wretched one, and if there is a God out there, his benignity is questionable. What type of hateful creature taunts fifty percent of the world’s population with gleeful statements like: 

_“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”_

Being a wizard meant, I had a say in all these conception matters, but my sorrows started long before that. Not only did I hate my body, my body hated me back with equal passion. We were at war with each other. When I realized that my victory was not forthcoming, I did my best to ignore whatever that bitch did to me, and definitely the way it developed over the next few years. 

Unfortunately, the male population of Foxhill refused to follow my shining example. 

Later, much later, when I had learned spells come with nuances, I wanted go back in time and tell my stupid male self that I’d happily cut off his balls right away if he was so intent on doing it, no reason to add all the other anguish to the mix. 

It wasn’t even that hidden! 

My saving grace had been that it took a few years for the erotic subcomponent to fully develop, or I would have finished what my stepfather never had the guts to do and ridded the earth of another witch. 

When it did hit me - I was around eighteen - I had grown confident enough to deal with the consequences. And Izzy had taught me some of the dirty tricks he had picked up during his years on the road and, boy, was that helpful. 

Miss Agatha found the additional complications as soon as she had had a look at the spell. 

I knew something was wrong the moment she put down her lunettes because for once her expression wasn’t one of exasperation, but of compassion. She tried to prepare me for what was to come, and maybe I should have listened, but let’s put it like this: At that time, I had not been ready to deal with words like ‘allure’ and ‘temptation’ in relation to that thing that had turned my existence into one of wretched misery: my body. 

Miss Agatha may have been a nagging old hag, but she knew when and how to pick her fights. Forcing me into dresses was a hill she was willing to die on, but she never made the mistake of calling me a girl. And although she wanted me to understand what was happening to me, she never tried to educate me about _my_ body. Instead, she explained that half of Foxhill’s population was female, and as nobody bothered to take care of their specific needs, it fell to us. Therefore, I had to learn a few things. 

Most of this caretaking was against the law, and the rest was a grey area, but, as Miss Agatha used to say: “Some things are lawful and others are ethical. You should always try to check both boxes, but if only one is possible … you know what to do.” 

So, when five minutes before I would close the shop, Maisie Milligan stood in front of the counter, wringing her hands and unable to utter a comprehensible sentence, I knew exactly what she wanted. I was just surprised that it should be Maisie Milligan of all people. 

“Stop wasting my time Maisie!” I said. “Take a deep breath, get your thoughts in order and say what you want. You’re not the first one and you won’t be the last, so don’t make it more special than it is.”

If I did my best, I could sound about as old and wise and jaded as Miss Agatha had been. 

“I …didn’t start bleeding this month,” she said barely audible. 

That much had been clear from her behaviour. I wished at least some of these girls would come before they rolled around in the hay. Then my intervention with God’s great plan would not be quite as illegal as what was about to follow now. 

“How long?” I asked, resigned that this would be one of those cases where I had to drag every single word out of the fallen girl. 

One might think that this type of service was mainly requested by unmarried women, but that was about as far from the truth as it could get. Most were seasoned wives whose body couldn’t take another child or who despaired trying to feed the children who were already there. Discussing the proceedings with them was a lot easier than with these blushing, stammering not-quite-a-virgin-anymores. Maisie was only a few years younger than me, yet right now I felt about twice her age. 

“Two weeks.”

I sighed. “And who is the lucky boy?”

Not that it was my business, but Maisie Milligan was such an odd case for this type of predicament that I at least hoped the culprit had some feelings for her. Because if she was just a notch on his belt … let’s say, I knew how to get the reproductive activities of the other half of the population under control, too. And it was a lot more fun. 

“That’s the problem,” she whispered even more lowly. “There isn’t one.”

“There isn’t … Maisie! You know how these things work, right?” 

It was an honest question. I remember Josie Irving crying about how she couldn’t be pregnant because she didn’t have a ring at her finger and didn’t you need one?

“Yes.”

“Then you know that you can’t be pregnant without male assistance, right?”

“But I’m late. I never am.”

The potion that ended a pregnancy was a heavy one. I had tinkered around with it ever since Miss Agatha had taught me the recipe and the result was nothing to sneeze at. It still wasn’t anything you downed on a whim. 

“I wondered …,” she now said. “I heard … I mean … Mrs Jones said Mr Stradlin was back.”

Mrs Jones wasn’t the only one who had something to say about Izzy’s return. The news had spread through Foxhill like wildfire, and that he lived in my house, when I was single and unattached and this extremely good-looking and tempting and alluring witch, had the gossip factory working overtime. Everybody knew exactly what Izzy was getting and those who weren’t scandalized turned green with envy. 

I was tempted to charge a fee for an exclusive look on the pitiful creature that had holed up in my old bedroom. We hardly spent enough time in each other’s company to partake in all the joyful activities we were rumoured to engage in. If I was lucky, he joined me at mealtimes, if not, I heard him ghost through the house at night in search for food. Getting a cat would have been more entertaining, and sometimes I wondered if it was still possible to exchange one for the other.

“They say …,” Maisie stuttered on. “That he can say…”

I took mercy on her. “…if somebody is truly pregnant. Yes, he can. But he also takes a shilling.” At least he had, back in the day. “And if you haven’t had sex, Maisie…”

Maisie blushed. “I do have a shilling,” she said. 

I gave up. She probably had had sex and didn’t want to talk about it. Fine with me. And Izzy could use both, the money and the interaction. 

It wasn’t about the money. Feeding Izzy was hardly a drain on my income, but he needed something, anything, to help him get back onto his feet. I didn’t blame him for his behaviour. I had been through my own phases of not wanting to leave the same room and the same bed, but if I had learned one thing, then that eventually you had to get up and make the first step. And if that was too much, then make a half one. Or a quarter. 

“Wait here,” I said. 

For once I was lucky. I had heard footsteps earlier, so Izzy had crawled out of bed, probably to hide in the library. My prediction was only halfway true. Yes, Izzy had left his bed, but he also had brought half of it down with him. He sat sideways on the sofa, feet up, the duvet pulled to his nose and reading a book. It was progress. 

“Do you have a minute?”

He looked up. 

“Do you remember Maisie Milligan?”

He shook his head. 

No miracle there. She wouldn’t have been his type. Not because of her looks, Izzy wasn’t overly particular in that department. Back in the day, he had taken whatever was offered. And that had been a lot because most of the time, his attentions had been well received. No, Izzy liked his women to be forward and saucy and … all right, I said it: slutty. Blushing virgins, no matter how pretty, were not to his taste. 

“She thinks she is pregnant. Can you have a look?”

“No.” Izzy returned to his book. 

“Come on, Izzy, how long will it take you? Five minutes? I don’t want to give her the potion when she’s not even likely to need it. She claims she hadn’t had sex at all.”

That caught his attention. “Who is she? The Virgin Mary?”

“No, Maisie Milligan. You must remember her. I think you had something with one of her older sisters. Lilly. Or was it Betsy? One of the nixies who live close to the Whittle. Oh, come one, you know her, shy, mousy, never to be spotted without at least half a dozen younger siblings clinging to her.”

“I’m not doing this shit anymore.”

I sighed. As good as Izzy was at reading auras, he didn’t like doing it for strangers. He said it was too intimate, so he avoided looking for anything that didn’t leap out. Only whenever money had been too tight, he had gotten over his reluctance. 

“Please,” I forced myself to say. 

He closed his eyes, but then he put the book aside and unwrapped his malnourished self out of the giant featherbed. At least he was dressed, which wasn’t as much of a given as one might think it should be. 

Dragging his feet until I wanted to take a broom and shoo him forward, Izzy headed towards the shop. Maisie’s eyes went wide when she saw him, and I fully understood the reason of her bewilderment. Maybe her sisters had once toppled over each other to gain his attentions, but at the moment he wasn’t much of a catch. The next round of gossip would include that I really had to be desperate. No surprise at my old age of twenty-two, and after rejection each electable bachelor Foxhill had to offer. 

He stopped a few steps after the door, and looked Maisie up and down exactly once. 

“Yep,” he said, turned on his heel and made to leave. 

He already had the door handle in his hand, when he stopped, faced Maisie again and asked: “Would you let me do a full reading?”

Surprised, I tried to catch his eye, but he was only interested in Maisie. 

“I … no … I mean … if It’s necessary,” she stuttered. 

“It isn’t,” Izzy said. “You’re … expecting … something. I’m just not sure … what.”

Maisie blanched. 

“I doubt it’s the Saviour,” Izzy said as if that was any consolation. 

Before Maisie had time to faint, I had pushed her into the library, and deposited her in an armchair. This was the first time in two weeks that he had shown interest in … anything, and I would offer my full support. Then I ran up to the laboratory for damage control. 

“Izzy, what the hell?” I said while he pilfered my supplies for whatever he needed. 

“I suppose it’s a parasite,” he said. “Could also be an incubus, but then it’s conceived and not planted, and from the look of it, I’d say, planted. But it’s pretty early, might be that I missed the split of the aura, so I’d better check.”

“Izzy!” 

He stopped and looked at me in confusion. “You wanted me to check.”

That was true and so I let him finish his supply run. Maisie hadn’t fainted, much to my relief, and complied with whatever Izzy asked her to do. It must have been the first time in her life that she was centre of attention. 

Having your aura read is not the fun it’s made out to be. Or maybe it is, but the few times I had Izzy allowed to use me as object for his experiments, it had left me vaguely unsettled. I preferred to see my body as a necessary evil, and having to acknowledge functions that weren’t strictly required for survival was not part of my plan. 

Maisie, I quickly realized, wasn’t prepared for the resulting dampness in her drawers either. Obediently she watched the flame, while I watched the patterns of her aura grow brighter and more three-dimensional, and remain just as incomprehensive as they had been before.

When Izzy finally extinguished the fire, she was bright crimson and eyed her fingernails in embarrassment and also a bit of wonderous surprise. In case Izzy was wrong and her predicament was the result of joyous companionship, the young man in question deserved a slap on the fingers. And probably some education about female anatomy. 

“Parasite, just as I thought,” Izzy said. “Look, Maisie, was it?”

Maisie nodded. 

“That thing in your uterus is not yours.”

I might not be the most delicate person in the world, but Izzy’s personal brand of bluntness had brought more callous people than Maisie Milligan to their knees. 

“Axl will make you this nice little potion of his and when that stuff starts to come out, I want you to make sure to keep it.”

“To … keep it?” Maisie stammered, and if she hadn’t, then I would have. 

“Yes. And then you bring it to me.”

“Izzy?” I took him by his shoulder. “Do you have a moment?”

He gave me an irritated look, as if I had interrupted a very important conversation, but then he allowed me to steer him out of the room. 

“Have you lost your mind?” I hissed as soon as we were alone. “You want the … the…”

“Foetus?” he asked. “Yes.”

“What for?” 

I should probably have tried to keep my voice down, but Izzy trying to get his hands on Maisy Milligan’s aborted parasite-foetus was more than I could handle in silence. That’s what happened if you took up pitiful looking wizards in the middle of the winter. 

“How am I supposed to track him down, huh?” he asked. 

“Track whom down?”

“The parasite. Look, Axl. He won’t stop at one. What do you think will happen when he picks a nice, normal, non-magical girl instead of some unimportant slag from Foxhill, huh?”

“Maisie’s not a slag,” I said, not sure why I felt the need to defend her. 

Izzy rolled his eyes. “But that’s what people will call her if this gets out. No matter that she can’t remember and that these bastards are far too good at what they are doing, point is: this can’t happen again and definitely not to one who isn’t one of us.”

There was some truth to what he was saying, but I still didn’t get what Izzy had to do with it. 

“You think we should inform the council?” 

He shrugged. “I think we should stop him. And I can track him down, but to do that I need something he left behind. And the foetus is the only thing I can think of.”

The last thing I want to do with my life is writing the Chronicles of Izzy’s Magical Adventures or some similar bullshit. So, I’ll cut a long story short: I did what I always do. 

I may put my personal sense of justice above the law, but things like that have to be done with some precautions. I don’t keep a stash of the potion, I don’t allow anybody to leave the house with it, and it will never be consumed in front of witnesses. Maisie drank it in the library and two days later she returned with a bag full of bloody rags. I am not informed in detail about what happened afterwards. And I don’t want to.

Suffice to say, Izzy went on a killing spree and returned in high spirits. And with a nick in his ear. Unlike a cat he held still when I wrapped gauze around his head. 

I did, however, inform the council, not because they absolutely needed to know, but because Izzy deserved more than one shilling for the whole undertaking, goddammit. I hadn’t expected them to come up with additional jobs for him. Or that Izzy would agree and take care of them. And come home once per week covered in blood, mucus, slime or whatever else those bastards dissolved into. 

Lucy demanded a rise and I made Izzy pay for it. 

A few weeks later, he came home carrying a brass sign under his arm, and without asking for permission, he nailed it to the back door of the shop. 

“Have you lost your mind?” I yelled when I read the inscription. “What kind of nonsense is this? Do you really think anybody will pay you for this lunacy?”

I didn’t get a reply. Not that I had expected one. But from that day, _A. Rose’s Herbs and Spices_ had a sign at its backdoor and it read: _Izzy Stradlin – Magical Investigations_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we are: Izzy's first case.


End file.
